Nigerian mum to appeal stoning

Nigerian single mother Amina Lawal was expected to launch an appeal before an Islamic court against her conviction for adultery, under which she faces death by stoning.

Lawal, 31, was convicted in March last year when fellow villagers in the northern Nigerian state of Katsina denounced her as an adulteress after she bore a child out of wedlock, an offence under Islamic Sharia law.

As she awaited the start of the appeal hearing, Lawal sat uncomfortably in the corner of the courtroom, cradling her baby daughter Wasila and fighting back tears as press photographers crowded around her.

There was heavy security as lawyers gathered at Katsina Sharia Appeal Court to await the state's top Islamic judges, who are to preside over their first criminal case since Sharia was reintroduced in parts of the west African country in 1999.

Around 35 armed police were deployed around the building, but there was no sign of impending trouble.

No verdict is expected, but the defence hopes to make a case that Lawal's conviction was flawed and that she could have become pregnant with a "sleeping embryo" fertilised during her earlier marriage.

"We are confident that we will win this time," said defence counsel Aliyu Musa Yawuri, who presided over Lawal's first, failed appeal in August last year at a district court near her home village of Kurami.

"Our position as Amina's counsel is that there's a presumption under the Sharia that a woman could be carrying a sleeping embryo for five years after her divorce," he told reporters at the court.

"Amina gave birth two years after her divorce," he added.

Last year, the man alleged to have been her lover swore on the Koran that he was not Wasila's father and was cleared of adultery, a term which under Islamic law applies to any relations with an unmarried divorcee.

"Amina is deeply worried. Sometimes she can't even eat. She's anxious to see the end of this case so that she can marry and have a normal life," said the defendant's uncle, 50-year-old farmer Magaji Liman.

Since losing her first appeal, Lawal has become an international media figure and inspired world-wide email protests and candle-lit vigils outside Nigeria's foreign embassies.

The case has become an embarrassment for Nigeria's secular federal government and for President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has tried to reassure foreign protesters without offending Nigerian Muslims.

No one has yet been stoned since 12 mainly Muslim northern states seized upon the end of military rule in 1999 to begin invoking Islamic law for the first time since independence 37 years earlier.

But some thieves have had their hands amputated, and several others have been sentenced to be stoned for various "sex crimes".